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New York University's union of graduate students has announced plans to strike next week. The university, which previously recognized the union, announced that it would no longer do so and union officials have said that they need a strike to get the university to return to collective bargaining. University officials have said that unionization was not good for the university, while union officials say that only collective bargaining can adequately protect the interests of teaching assistants.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear an appeal by Microsoft to lower the potential damages it faces in a patent dispute with the University of California and another company, Bloomberg News reported. The case involves a dispute over the Internet Explorer Web browser and Microsoft could face hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

The District of Columbia Tuition Assistance Grant program had inadequate documentation proving the eligibility of more than a third of the students who received funds through the program and had flawed procedures for segregating money for the program from the District of Columbia's general funds, the Government Accountability Office said in a report Monday. The program, which was created in 1999, provides financial aid funds to allow Washington residents to attend public institutions in other states at in-state rates. The report found the program to be operating effectively in other ways.

College students had $31 billion in "unmet" financial need in the 2003-4 academic year, according to a report released Monday by the State PIRGs' Higher Education Project. The report, which was based on Education Department statistics and analyzed by Postsecondary Education Opportunity, a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of low-income students, concluded that students responded to the unmet need -- the gap between the full cost of attendance at their colleges and the combination of their expected family contributions and the financial aid they received -- by working more and taking out more loans outside their financial aid packages.